Richard of Evesham (occasionally of Eynsham) was
Abbot
Abbot is an ecclesiastical title given to the male head of a monastery in various Western religious traditions, including Christianity. The office may also be given as an honorary title to a clergyman who is not the head of a monastery. The fem ...
of
Vale Royal from 1316 to 1342.
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The Vale Royal chronicler praises Abbot Richard in the same tones he had Richard's predecessor. He certainly had a reputation for religious devotion; but these were troubled times on at least two accounts. Firstly, a period of national
famine
A famine is a widespread scarcity of food, caused by several factors including war, natural disasters, crop failure, Demographic trap, population imbalance, widespread poverty, an Financial crisis, economic catastrophe or government policies. Th ...
began the same year as his election. Further, he faced the same, continuing, local disorder from a seething populace as his predecessors had.
This dispute had been ongoing since the 1270s, and generally coalesced around the Abbot of Vale Royal's tenantry denouncing their Abbot as a cruel and unscrupulous landlord, and their concomitant rejection of his claims to
feudal lord
An overlord in the Kingdom of England, English Feudalism in England, feudal system was a lord of the manor, lord of a manor who had Subinfeudation, subinfeudated a particular Manorialism, manor, Estate in land, estate or fief, fee, to a Leaseho ...
ship over them. By Abbot Richard's time, this had increased in bitterness on his tenantry's behalf that on one occasion, whilst travelling around the villages collecting the Church's
tithe
A tithe (; from Old English: ''teogoþa'' "tenth") is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government. Today, tithes are normally voluntary and paid in cash or cheques or more r ...
s, he was personally attacked. And 1320 saw not just further violence but bloodshed: one of the Abbey's monks was assaulted in
Tarvin, and in
Darnhall
Darnhall is a civil parish and small village to the south west of Winsford in the Borough of Cheshire West and Chester and the ceremonial county of Cheshire in England. It had a population of 232 at the 2011 Census.
History
The Norman Earls o ...
, a servant of Abbot Richard was killed. In this particularly barbarous episode, having killed the man, the malefactors cut his head off and played football with it.
See also
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Dispute between Darnhall and Vale Royal Abbey
In the early fourteenth century, tensions between villagers from Darnhall and Over, Cheshire, and their feudal lord, the Abbot of Vale Royal Abbey, erupted into violence over whether they had villein—that is, servile—status. The villagers ar ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
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{{The History of Vale Royal Abbey
13th-century English people
Abbots of Vale Royal Abbey